History Book Reviews

On a day when barbarians have apparently attacked what was the capital of the world's largest (formal) empire, three reviews of books on Rome, North Korea, and Stalin's USSR are worth considering.

Rome
This review by Peter Jones of two new books on the collapse of Rome is particularly apt as a glimpse of what a true war of civilizations may mean. "Peter Heather makes a strong case for one overriding explanation: the Huns. Meanwhile, Bryan Ward-Perkins poses a different question: what were the implications of the end of the empire for your average provincial?"

According to Heather, the collapse in the West was triggered in summer 376 by one event with huge ramifications: the sudden and quite unexpected irruption of a new and terrifying people into barbarian territory on Roman borders - the Huns. It was pressure from them that drove barbarians (Goths, Visigoths, Franks, Alans) into the Western empire over the next 60 years. The Romans were helpless to stop them... Setting his face firmly against scholarly fashion, which dictates that everything about "Europe" must be "positive" and that no cultures are allowed to be more sophisticated than others, Ward-Perkins argues that the demise of Rome led to a collapse of general living standards from the 5th to the 7th centuries so severe that the result was effectively "the end of civilisation".

North Korea
Yoel Sano's review of a new history of North Korea by Bradley Martin is itself a decent capsule history of that bizarre and frightening place, and of its two leaders, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Among other interesting information, Martin points out (in Sano's words) that

"Kim Il-sung was born into a Christian background, on April 15, 1912 (the same day the Titanic sunk, Kim's critics like to point out)... At the time, Martin notes, Pyongyang had become something of a "Jerusalem" of the Far East, because of the large presence of Christians converted by American missionaries in earlier years... While Kim later played down his Christian background, aspects of the religion - albeit extreme - do seem to have had an impact on his life and style of governance."

Beyond even that odd historical angle (and the weird amalgam of sex and violence in the North Korean elite), Martin's book shows that "more than being a modern socialist state, North Korea is, and has been, run along the lines of a quasi-medieval kingdom organized through a bizarre mish-mash of Stalinist communism, ultra-nationalism and xenophobia, hyper-elitism of the ruling class, and Confucian principles of filial piety and obedience to rulers taken to the extreme."

Martin's take on possible resolutions to the current tension between North Korea and the United States are worth reviewing, too, as they run the gamut from detonating in a war to defusing through a Nixon-in-China-style visit to the PRK by a Western leader.

The Soviet Union
Finally, in a new history of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Russian historian Constantine Pleshakov (whose name evokes Rome!) makes the surprising argument that the Soviets did not anticipate Hitler's attack that summer because "Stalin was planning a preemptive strike against Germany but thought he had at least a year's time because he could not bring himself to believe that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union before Britain had fallen." If, in his reviewer's assessment, Pleshakov has a hard time making that argument,

He does much better when describing the opening days of the war itself -- the slaughter, panic and confusion. The Red Army had, for security reasons, opted for cable communications over wireless but in "something approaching criminal negligence, the telegraph lines had been left unprotected on the night of June 21." With their easy disablement by the German forces, intelligence could not be shared. Armies vanished. The Commissariat of Defense lost contact with 10 of 26 special trains that had been sent west. The slaughter was horrific. ".... On average, a soldier died every two seconds." ... Preparations for defense, evacuation and retreat -- treasonous concepts -- were nonexistent.

Pleshakov makes another provocative argument, too: "The purge of the officer class in the late 1930s did something even worse than leave the Army unprepared -- it made a military coup impossible. 'The Great Terror saved the dictator and his system; instead of collapsing in the summer of 1941, as it should have, it survived for another fifty years.'"